Bill Rancic

Speaking of economic confidence, someone who isn't lacking in it, for obvious reasons, is Bill Rancic, the first winner of The Apprentice with Donald Trump. Bill is still out there, giving speeches, preparing a new A&E show for the fall called Mind Your Business, in which he helps rescue failing small businesses (the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy / Supernanny model). I saw Rancic at a business event in Green Bay ten days ago.

He was a surprisingly polished public speaker with some cogent and interesting things to say, about the need for agility in entrepreneurship, for example, and the role of due diligence in vetting business propositions. He was very good with the Q&A, always a test. At a private meet and greet afterward, he was thoroughly charming. If one had been gunning to hate the guy (I wasn't), he didn't give you much reason!

He also had women in the audience swooning, because the camera isn't doing it all for him; he really is that handsome. I heard comments afterward like "I've never seen such beautiful eyes." He was well dressed, too, which interested me; his new wife (a supermodel-beautiful E! reporter, natch) is the daughter of an Italian master tailor, and his bespoke striped gray suit was predictably to die for, and fit like a glove.

But one aspect of Rancic's handsomeness bugged me a bit. I noticed it in the promotional materials, I noticed it in person, and I especially noticed it in a group photo we had taken that was distributed afterward. The man's teeth are, as has become de rigueur in Hollywood, gleamingly, unaturally white. In the group photo they look radioactive; he could audition to play a lighthouse. Now I've had my teeth whitened, I'm not against it, but this is way beyond that. They're not really his teeth, for one thing, because you can't achieve that shade through standard whitening techniques; they have to be veneers or caps. I am struck that we have created a standard for dental display in those who appear before the public that does not even have a point of reference in nature. Weird.